A Stone at The End of Time

All I have now is you, my sweet. I have watched the days go by in silent disbelief, in awe-struck shock and slow-growing disassociation. Everything that once ever was has long ago been reduced to dust and I have been left alone to wander through blasted ruins and a withering world. You have been my solace. I know you have long since died some countless millennia ago, painlessly, for I know it was instantaneous. I hope you were with your family and had your friends close and that your final moments were happy. It would make me happy. Knowing that you had not lived past that moment, I shall do my best to sum up the millennia that followed.

When whatever had ended the world had done so in that searing instant, I had not moved on. Some weapon or natural cycle had vaporised every living thing on the planet but spared me. For what ends, I could not say if there was even meaning in it. It took me days to recover my vision, at least I thought it had to be days for I felt the warmth of the sun and cold of the moon. All that time I lay blind and wondered why I had heard nothing, why nobody had come to help me.

I lay and drowned in darkness, drifting into slow madness as my mind begged for anything but the empty music of the new world. There, in that void you came to me in dreams and visions that I know I could not have seen, you and others came. I danced in imaginary worlds and told fantastic stories of what could have been, free of crushing reality, of constraint. All these worlds, though, ended in fire. Perhaps it was my mind preparing me for what lay ahead, my subconscious already knowing the bitter truth that I could not yet accept and feeding it to me gently in honeyed spoonfuls until finally, I could see. Only then did my sight return.

The madness did not yet fade and I was hounded by the ghosts of my mind as I desperately searched an ashen land. No bodies had remained and no bones lay to be scattered in familiar positions that told of a life once lived. It was as if the world had simply moved on without me. I searched, I thought so foolishly then that there had to be something. If I had survived, then surely someone else had. How human of me, I suppose, to wish so strongly to survive and find another, to perpetuate life in a world that had clearly refused to embrace it any longer. By day I wandered to those ends and by night I would sit and gaze at the empty heavens and sleep would sometimes come. I would never find another soul. But still, I had you.

By my side, you stayed, locked in that little metal heart that hung about my neck until I had not a neck to speak of. There you stayed long after the little paper picture had faded and dissolved and joined the dust I walked on. There you stayed in memory until the very image of you I held in my mind like a beacon had warped and faded too.

It must have been my thousandth year, long after the ghosts of my madness had left me and you were all I had, that I lost you. Perhaps the chain had dissolved into dust or no longer fit my neck. I knew not the reason, only that you were not there when I looked down. It pains me but I cannot remember the true depths of my despair that day, the memories so painful that all the sand in the world could not wear down the sharp edges and so I refuse to handle them. I backtracked, following the long line of footsteps in the sand, searching for lifetimes until I could no longer distinguish which set of tracks were coming and going, then I had truly lost you and consequently, myself. And still, I walked on.

The world had changed and I, so long ago divorced from the memory of what I had been before, changed with it. The first of the changes were subtle, so subtle I could not tell you how it started only that it had happened. My mind had regressed, after countless days, into itself and I became a thing of instinct, of walking loneliness. My only thoughts were of one foot falling then the other, then the other, then the other.

The next of the changes were physical, as years seemed to pass in relative minutes I noticed that I had become something unrecognisable. Curiously, I had not needed to eat or drink and in a rare moment of clarity, I came to realise that those systems had faded from my body. My eyes had become small and sunken in the harsh light of the wasted world and my skin had hardened into scales to protect me from the elements. In time my mouth had seemed to shrink into nothingness, unnecessary, useless, cast aside. I became as silent as the world around me.

It was a very long time after the world had died that I crossed my own tracks again. I had walked a straight path so I must conclude that I had walked the world in its entirety. Still, I had not found anything. Strangely enough, this revelation did not concern me in the way it once had. I suppose that I had become so different that at that time I no longer concerned myself with the worries of my former human self. If I had not died yet, then what use was the continuation of my old species. More practically, I could not speak or gesture now with this twisted body of mine and surely looked horrifying to whatever other human I might have found. And what was to say that they had not changed themselves into something else entirely.

I could not even remember how I had looked all those years ago but it hardly seemed to matter now, not without you. I would not say that I was content but I had resolved myself to walking and I did not see any reason to stop now.

In a thousand million centuries I had crossed my own tracks so many times that the world had seemed to be only made of an unbroken channel that spiralled about the world, the walls and path itself packed hard into stone by my endless passing. It seemed that this was all that had been and all that will ever be. That was until I looked down one day to find something that was not dust. A little heart of rusted metal, decaying but unmistakable for its stark difference to the unchanging world around it.

I knew even as I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye that it was you, my lost love. And as I looked down I felt emotion stir in me as it had not done in millennia. As I went to pick you up, to cradle you as I once had, I realised that I no longer could. My arms had long since shrivelled into something unusable. I could not leave you again and I could not take you with me, so I waited.

As night came, I lay myself down as I usually did except I did not look to the stars, I looked only at you. I decided that I would not rise and walk with the sun but sit with you instead. I could not lose you again. Instead, I told you a story. I remembered that you liked my stories. This was the story of how we came to be here. With all the time in the universe, I told it slowly but perhaps a little too slowly.

So, here we sit, you and I, and here I feel we will sit for a long while. I can feel that I have changed again, my legs no longer wish to walk and my hard, scaled skin is like stone. I am drifting away with glacial-slow thoughts, the thoughts of living rock. Soon I will close my eyes for the last time and they too will harden and become useless.

But I have my thoughts and I have the memory of you and that will be enough for me. I should very much like to fall back into those worlds of madness I had long ago dreamed in my delirium. Perhaps I already have. If I am talking to you now, my dear, sweet ghost then perhaps I balance on the delicate precipice of sanity, waiting to forever tumble at the gentlest of pushes. Perhaps I shall jump instead, at least that way it is on my terms.

Even now I can see the beginnings of another world in my mind’s eye, the delicate dance of atoms in the fiery aftermath of a cosmic explosion. In a trillion years, stars will form in this imaginary universe and later, planets. It will take time but that, it seems, I have as much as there are grains of sand in this desert. It will be a spectacular show to watch the infinite years to come unfold and somewhere along that journey, I will see you again and tell you another story.